Christian is also the creator of Neofeud — a game that I have recently finished playing on my YouTube channel. Being the gracious, well-mannered guest that my parents diligently taught me to be, I immediately proceeded to absolutely spoil the shit out of the ending of his game … so, uh, spoiler warning if you haven’t played Neofeud.

We recorded our chat with our pretty faces, so you can watch two talking heads converse with each other from across the globe here:

You can also subscribe to Christian’s podcast via this feed and listen to it on the go, if that’s your thing.

In all honesty, I was a bit tired when we recorded this — but thankfully Christian is just as big a rambler than me, so we were very much in tune as we darted from tangent to tangent. I had a blast talking to Christian and hope to be able to pick his brain some more in the future.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2018/03/17/silver-spook-podcast/feed/0silverspookthumbpleimertTwo guest shows in a rowhttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2018/03/05/two-guest-shows-in-a-row/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2018/03/05/two-guest-shows-in-a-row/#respondMon, 05 Mar 2018 10:50:14 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=2079It seems like I’ve nearly forgotten about this page by now, and, truthfully, I nearly have. With everything that’s going on over in the land of YouTube and Twitch, blogging seems like a past-time that borders on self-indulgence more than anything.

But I do want to keep a record of my past accomplishments, however small they may be in the grand scheme of things, and to that end, I am now (very belatedly) archiving these appearances I did on two other shows. I did these almost back-to-back on the same day, so by the time I was done, it felt like I had run a live-stream marathon. I hadn’t, of course, but I did get to bed very, very late in the morning.

First, I went on Human Interact’s live-stream to watch Alexander play Phantasmagoria. Having recently completed my own playthrough of the game (featuring Richard Cobbett and Natalie Juhasz as co-commentators), I relished the opportunity to share the pain of playing that awful, awful FMV travesty with yet another person.

Then, a few hours later, I went on Indie Game Riot’s live podcast to chat about Snail Trek, the game that made parser games fun to play again. The host and I — never met him before, incidentally — quickly hit it off and started going off on long tangents about adventure game design in general, so it was a very fun experience. I thought it was going to be me in a crowd of people, so I didn’t really expect to be on camera, nor did I expect to be practically the only other guy on the show beside the host and a couple of commenters in the Twitch chat.

I had a blast with both appearances, and a big ol’ thank you to both Alexander and the IGR guys for having me on their shows.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2018/03/05/two-guest-shows-in-a-row/feed/0microphone-2170045_1920pleimertAdventures in sound: My ongoing struggle with audio fidelityhttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/09/22/adventures-in-sound-my-ongoing-struggle-with-audio-fidelity/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/09/22/adventures-in-sound-my-ongoing-struggle-with-audio-fidelity/#respondFri, 22 Sep 2017 10:01:24 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=2049Steady on, because this post is not really about adventure games per se. It’s about audio, specifically the challenges of recording clean audio, and it gets a bit technical. So if you don’t give a shit about microphones, audio devices, gating, compression, and whatever else goes into that stuff, you’re best off reading something else. I’ll get back to talking about adventure games next time (probably).

Not an insignificant amount of people who are watching my Let’s Plays on YouTube have noticed that my audio setup is not the greatest in the world.

Me mix good audio.

Specifically, there is an omnipresent hiss in my commentary audio, which — although barely noticeable when you’re listening to it on speakers — becomes very irritating when listening to it with headphones.

It’s something that’s been annoying me a lot, too. Mostly because I was under the delusional impression that I was actually okay — not great, but okay — with audio production. I’ve produced music since my early teens and you’d think I would have at least a rudimentary grasp of what constitutes good audio.

Before I go any further, let me just explain my setup real brief. When I record videos, I use OBS Studio to capture the game footage as well as my facecam. (Yes, I have experimented with divorcing my facecam from OBS as well and filming that with a separate camera, but that’s a topic for an entirely different post.) I don’t use OBS for recording my commentary audio, though. I have my microphone muted in OBS, and I use Audacity on the side to record a wav-file of what’s going into my mic. That way, when I’m editing, I can control the balance between commentary audio and game audio separately, so one doesn’t drown out the other.

My microphone is a Sennheiser E835 S that, while admittedly getting on in years (it’s over a decade old now), is still going strong. I’ve been to a music shop and had them test it out — the microphone works fine. Granted, it’s not a studio mic — it’s made primarily for singing on stage — but it’s a good quality mic.

The mic goes into a similarly aged M-Audio MobilePre, which — if the internet is to be trusted, which it rarely is, but there seems to be a large consensus on this — is not a bad piece of hardware. It’s got 40v phantom power (not that I need it with my directional Sennheiser mic), and it’s got a built-in preamp. Meaning the audio signal going from the mic through the device into the computer should be pretty strong — at least, in theory.

This little beauty has stood by me for more than a decade.

In practice, though, that’s not the case. I have to turn the gain on the MobilePre up very high to get anywhere near audible levels. And when you turn the gain up that high, you get — yes, you guessed it — noise. A lot of it.

And even then, the mic volume still isn’t very loud. So I would use Audacity’s built-in compressor tool to level out the mic audio so I got a nice, loud waveform. But that means boosting the signal even further once it’s already been recorded, and guess what that means? The noise gets even louder. During quiet parts when I’m not speaking, it sounded like I was doing my commentary inside a wind tunnel.

Of course, there are ways around that. After applying compression, I would then apply gate so the signal would go completely silent when the volume dropped below a certain level (i.e. when I’m not speaking). It helped a bit, but there was still audible noise when I was speaking.

That’s why I went out and bought a new audio device, thinking that perhaps my dear old MobilePre had outlived its usefulness. I reached out on Twitter and asked if anyone knew about some good — and, importantly, low-noise — audio devices. I got some good recommendations, but ended up going with Rebecca McCarthy’s suggestion of a Presonus Audiobox 96. She’s a voice actress and uses this device to record her voice-over, and she swore it was quiet.

Problem solved, right?

Well, the thing arrived, I gingerly plugged it into my computer, and … well, fuck. Still getting a lot of noise. Worse still, when I tried to record a game, the Presonus wasn’t playing nice and wouldn’t share its audio output with both the game and OBS at the same time. With OBS running, the game would be completely mute.

Now, I know that I could have experimented more and perhaps found a solution to the audio sharing problem. But I bought this thing because I thought it would magically fix my audio hiss problem, and it didn’t. I even tried a different mic — a Superlux HO-8 condenser mic I stole from a friend of mine years ago, which uses phantom power, and it sounded even worse, so my guess is that mic is not doing terribly well.

There was nothing wrong with Rebecca’s suggestion. I’m sure the Presonus is great at what it does. I mean, Rebecca says she uses it and has no problems getting nice, low-hiss audio, and she’s a professional. The problem wasn’t with my choice of audio device. The problem seems to lie within my computer itself.

So the Presonus went back in its box and back to the store I got it from. It would seem that the MobilePre was innocent after all, and the problem didn’t lie with my audio device at all. Nor, as it turns out, my audio cable (I bought a brand-new XLR microphone cable, just in case), or my microphone (which I had a professional audio engineer test out). Not only that, but I also borrowed a third audio device from the music store where I tested the mic, and that one didn’t work at all — all I got were some very worrying clicking noises in my headphones — so that went back as well.

Now, I know what the audio savvy are going to say: Pre-amps. Stick a pre-amp in between the mic and the MobilePre, and it should boost the signal before it reaches the computer — hopefully without adding any more noise to the signal. I haven’t tried that yet because, shit, do you know what those things cost? A lot, is the answer. Also, the MobilePre already has a built-in preamp, so you’d think that would be enough!

Another suggestion that’s been thrown my way has to do with the actual voltage that goes into the MobilePre. One of my Patrons posited that perhaps the MobilePre itself is not getting the power it needs from the computer to process the power that the preamp inside and the microphone requires. He suggested that I buy a USB hub that goes between the computer and the MobilePre, which (in theory) should be able to process the voltage coming out of the computer in a more sensible way. That’s at least something I can try out in the future without breaking the bank.

Maybe this will be what my audio setup looks like in the future.

In the meantime, I have experimented a bit with ways to reduce the hiss with software. Audacity’s filters aren’t terribly user-friendly, so I haven’t had much luck using its noise reduction filter to quench the noise. However, it turns out that Adobe Premiere Pro has some pretty good audio filters built in — even the older version I’m using. It has compression, which means I can boost the sound, and it has a very good noise filter that does manage to bury much of the noise at the mild expense of losing some minor treble range.

When I used the noise filter in Audacity, it sounded like I was speaking into the mic through the wall in an entirely different room. With the Premiere Pro filter, it actually does what I expect it to. So now, the only filter I use in Audacity is the gate, not applying any audio leveling or compression, and then I pump that into Premiere and work with Premiere’s filters to make it listenable.

That’s where I am now. Still using the same old setup, just getting better at using audio filters. Maybe someday I’ll work out exactly why my I need to turn up my MobilePre so ridiculously loud, but for now, I hope the audio annoyances are at least becoming more bearable for those of you watching my videos with headphones.

The first video to use this new setup will be episode 4 of Observer, which comes out Thursday 28th, 2017. And I will of course continue to fine-tune it as I go on editing. You know, until I stumble upon an actual solution.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/09/22/adventures-in-sound-my-ongoing-struggle-with-audio-fidelity/feed/0Bad soundpleimertMake your own Sierra death memeshttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/08/22/sierra-death-memes/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/08/22/sierra-death-memes/#respondTue, 22 Aug 2017 08:05:48 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=2041You know it, I know it. Sierra games were so unfair, man! Well, now you can have a bit of fun at their expense.

A little while back, I made a couple of Photoshop templates for the Sierra death screens — both AGI (Space Quest I & II era) and SCI0 (Space Quest III era).

We’ve had some fun with these on Twitter for a while now, and I think it’s time to unleash them unto the world. Feel free to download these and create your own Sierra deaths — use them as memes, as reaction gifs, or just for shit and giggles.

AGI death screen.

SCI death screen.

Simply put your choice of graphics in the transparent “holes” in the template (just put any image you want on the bottom layer, and resize it to taste). Then edit the text to suit your needs.

In the first episode, I talk about how Space Quest fans playing on an MS-DOS PC were jealous of those playing on an Amiga, because the Amiga people got to enjoy the game with digital sound effects.

Most famously, being able to actually hear Roger actually speak the words, “Where am I?” in the intro (even though the line is actually in a thought bubble, but never mind that).

Turns out that the MS-DOS version actually did ship with all the digital sound effects in the game code. They were in the game files when the game was released in 1989, and they are still in the game files if you buy the game on GOG or Steam today.

What it didn’t ship with was a working SoundBlaster driver.

UPDATE: Well, actually, it did … sort of.

Since writing this post, I’ve had a few people tweet me to tell me they did hear the digital sound effects when they played the game back in the day. That was quite surprising, as I was under the impression that the SoundBlaster driver for the game was just faulty regardless of circumstances.

Turns out, the SoundBlaster driver does work, but only on specific cards, and only with specific settings. Here’s one chap who got it working on an official Creative Labs brand SoundBlaster 8-bit card with IRQ 7:

Sure, the game supports SoundBlaster. But the driver is faulty, and will only play music (using the SoundBlaster’s OPL chip).

Luckily, intrepid fans have created a working SoundBlaster driver for the game. The patch used to reside on the old SpaceQuest.net website, which has since undergone some restructuring. I did, however, manage to rescue the driver from it, and use it for my YouTube playthrough.

You will need to be at least somewhat proficient in DOS to use it, as it was made for people who purchased the old Space Quest Collection anthologies on CD-ROM. If you’ve purchased it from the aforementioned digital outlets (GOG or Steam), be prepared to get down and dirty with DOSBox.

The patch includes fixes for two types of SoundBlaster cards, depending on what IRQ they used. If you are using DOSBox to apply the patch (which I was), just go for the one that says “IRQ 5/7” (which were the most common IRQ values for SoundBlaster cards, and therefore the ones that DOSBox emulates).

Now, as I also explain in the video, Space Quest III is from an era where it was unfathomable that someone would have two sound cards installed in their computer. Therefore, Space Quest III only natively supports one sound card at a time.

That’s a slight problem because if you have an MT-32 emulator, you would definitely want to play this game with MT-32 music! It sounds fantastic!

But if you enable MT-32 audio, then you won’t get to hear the digitized sound effects. Can’t select more than one sound card at a time!

This eliminates the use for the above patch … but it’s also arguably less rewarding to get working. Regardless, I am going to do that for the remaining episodes of my Space Quest III playthrough because, hot damn, that MT-32 soundtrack. So good.

And before you ask, no, I am not supplying you the ROMs for the MT-32 emulation. You’ll have to go find those on your own.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/07/27/playing-space-quest-iii-with-digitized-sound-effects/feed/1Space Quest III - Where am I?pleimertFeats of strength (and failure)https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/26/feats-of-strength-and-failure/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/26/feats-of-strength-and-failure/#respondMon, 26 Jun 2017 10:41:45 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=2012Bit of old news at this point, I’m afraid, but it deserves archiving. Another one of Joe’s Hangouts took place earlier this month, covering a topic that I suggested. I really shouldn’t have, because I didn’t have any good stories to share on the subject, but it worked out well, anyway.

As usual, the whole thing took place on Hangouts, which means you can watch the participants on video talking about how they wrangled DOS memory managers, CD-ROM games that were impossible to get running, and other assorted tales of pre-Windows XP heroism.

Sadly, my connection was pretty choppy, so there’s a lot of stuttering and unplanned robotic voice filtering coming from my end. I blame Hangouts, though, because the very next day, I was streaming Life Is Strange in 60 fps on Twitch with no problems, so … fuck you, Google.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/26/feats-of-strength-and-failure/feed/0UMB Hangout: Feats of StrengthpleimertQuelle surprise: Adventure games are STILL not deadhttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/02/quelle-surprise-adventure-games-are-still-not-dead/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/02/quelle-surprise-adventure-games-are-still-not-dead/#commentsFri, 02 Jun 2017 11:50:03 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=1972Matt Wales has written for Kotaku a piece entitled “Point and Click is Dead Again,” and that sound you just heard was the collective adventure gaming community all around the world sighing in exasperation. The article itself is either petulant whining or, worse, clickbait — perhaps both.

In it, Mr. Wales argues that the adventure gaming mechanics of yore are tired and clichéd; relics of an era gone by. “Haven’t we moved on by now?” he seems to ask between the lines, perhaps whilst alternating between stroking the perceived cleverness of his ego and his cock. He apparently arrived at this earth-shattering conclusion of said genre demise because Syberia 3 really sucked balls.

Congratulations, Syberia 3, you are apparently the Gabriel Knight 3 of the modern era.

No, Mr. Wales, adventure games are not dead. Let us forego the immediate knee-jerk response by bringing up recent titles that are firmly rooted in classic genre tropes but still manage to stay fresh and vibrant, like Paradigm, Kathy Rain, Tesla Effect, Shardlight — a pass he attempts half-heartedly to head off in the opening paragraphs of his article. (Why he would put Thimbleweed Park in there is beyond me, though — if anything, THAT game, almost by its own admission, belongs in a museum.)

Let us instead focus on the absurdity of declaring a genre “dead.” I can only assume this was a calculated move on his part to dredge up a tired old cliché in an article that, ironically, focuses on tired old clichés.

Never in the history of video gaming have I ever come across a genre that has been so repetitively pronounced dead only to actually be found alive and well as adventure games. Therefore, part of me feels like he must be acutely aware of this, and how many times it has been proven wrong, but chose to perpetuate this fallacy anyway in the hopes of getting a rise out of the genre’s fans.

I guess it worked, because shit:

'Point and clicks are dead' is just the most generic, overly repeated take. We've had articles like this since the early 90s.

Adventure games never were dead, or can die, because a genre cannot “die.”

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that everyone stopped making adventure games. Which the industry nearly did for a decade. There was still a precious body of work dating back to the early 80s to explore, and game making utilities such as Adventure Game Studio were starting to take a foothold, creating a vibrant underground resurgence of amateur-made adventure games.

It was burgeoning, yes, and it was nowhere near as prevalent as the genre’s seemingly omnipresent heyday of the mid-90s. But it was there.

But, noooo, that didn’t lead anywhere, did it?

Let’s say it’s now a punishable offense to put an inventory-based puzzle or a dialogue tree in a game. Can we declare the genre dead now?

Of course we can’t. As Mr. Wales states, elements of adventure games have started seeping into other genres, melding together, making it ever-more difficult to label a game as either this-that-or-the-other. You can’t kill something that has already started assimilating (or being assimilated, depending on your point of view) other entities.

Because what Mr. Wales fails to account for is precisely what types of adventure games he feels so negatively about. He praises walking simulators and Telltale games, suggesting to me that he finds the gameplay mechanics of quote-unquote “traditional” adventure games tedious. It would seem he would prefer to focus on story first and puzzles second.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but you would be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that Mr. Wales just doesn’t appreciate a challenge. Maybe he just really, really dislikes what he describes as “the clumsy staccato rhythm of point-and-clickers,” or, as I like to call it, the “adventure games are not movies but I somehow failed to make that connection” fallacy.

Whatever the reason, it’s certainly no reason to declare anything dead just because one guy doesn’t like something.

I don’t enjoy playing Starcraft in the slightest, but I’m not about to call RTS games dead because of it.

I’m not saying that point-and-click adventure games are the perfect storytelling vehicle, because that’s not what they’re supposed to be. They’re supposed to be a melting pot of various elements including puzzles and storytelling.

I would say the primary function of an adventure game is facilitating satisfaction of being instrumental in the advancement of a story through your own cleverness. Sometimes they fail miserably at this (Discworld), but when they work, they work beautifully beyond description.

The balance between telling a good story and the satisfaction of accomplishment is the bread and butter of adventure games. You’re free to pour praise on experiments, like The Last Express or Mr. Wales’ favorite example The Sexy Brutale, and I’m not here to suggest that we shouldn’t evolve and refine and welcome new ideas.

I’m just saying don’t declare something dead just because you don’t like it.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/06/02/quelle-surprise-adventure-games-are-still-not-dead/feed/4Pandora Directive game overpleimertMaking “Kitty Quest” – my submission for AdventureJam 2017https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/20/making-kitty-quest-my-submission-for-adventurejam-2017/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/20/making-kitty-quest-my-submission-for-adventurejam-2017/#commentsSat, 20 May 2017 11:50:54 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=1939They say, “Never work with children or animals.” And that was indeed the phrase that instantly popped into mind when my wife responded to my question, “What do you think I should do for this year’s AdventureJam?” with, “Why not make a game about our cats?”

I couldn’t help myself, though. It was such a hilarious idea. Cats and the internet are always a winning combination; talking cats even moreso. And it fit right into the mindset I’d had since the first time I participated in AdventureJam, when it was called Point & Click Jam, that I wasn’t so much in this to win approval as I just wanted to do something batshit crazy and hopefully freak the judges out.

Cocaine-dealing squirrels oughta do the trick.

So, without really knowing how I was going to get my two cats to actually appear in the game, I set out to create Kitty Quest — a story more or less born out of a five-minute brainstorm with my wife about how our indoor rescue cat, Pemberton Flæsk Mis Mis Brunata Odenkirk (yes, that’s his name), wanted to escape the confines of our house on a warm summer day. His companion would be our other cat, Carlin Spinoza Bøffelsovs (also real name), who is an energetic but dopey Maine Coon cat.

It wasn’t a fully fleshed out story by any means. In fact, the escape part turned out to just be the first act of a (very small) two-act game. Escaping our house would then send them on a small adventure where they faced the horrors that lurk outdoors, eventually causing them to change their minds and head back home.

Capturing feline movement

The first thing we set out to do was photograph the cats. If you’re thinking, “How hard can that be?”, you’re either not a cat owner, or you’ve never tried to get your cat to do something on command.

Cats are not easily trainable, and we’ve never bothered training our cats to do anything except poop in their box and, for the most part, not jump on our kitchen counter or scratch the sofa. I’m pretty sure the only thing we’ve really successfully trained them to do is the poop thing; while they know full well we don’t like the jumping and scratching part, I’m pretty sure they do so when we’re not looking, anyway.

Luckily, they like to play. So, with my wife at floor level brandishing her SLR camera, I tried multiple times to get the cats to run across our living room floor, preferably facing sideways, by dangling a cat toy on a string at various ends of the room. Of the thousands of images she photographed, two or three of them turned out useful for making walkcycles.

I was wearing shorts, I swear!

Reach for the sky, boy!

The kitties are starting to find this exercise uninspiring.

Carlin caught the toy and now refuses to let go. Actors, man.

Pemberton receives praise for his work.

Making the walkcycles wasn’t too tricky. I just had to cut out the cats onto a transparent canvas and resize them so their heads were about the same size in every frame. Photoshop’s “quick selection” and “refine edge” tools were godsends in this — especially with Carlin, whose fur is really bushy and all over the place.

My wife underwent a similar treatment, but I didn’t have to dangle a string this time.

“Recreating” our house

I contemplated just taking pictures of our actual house, but decided against it. To make a more “adventure game friendly” room setup — one that wasn’t too cluttered with items that could potentially be interacted with (and would be tough to animate from a still photo) — I decided to go with a “Photoshop collage” type art style.

This is the same approach I’m using for Space Quest Historian: The Adventure Game. I basically start a blank canvas in Photoshop and draw in the lines of roughly where the floor, walls, and ceiling are. Then I start pulling in objects and textures from Google Images searches.

All the objects that appear/disappear are separate layers. These are made into transparent images and imported into the game separately.

You could argue that this is stealing. You could also argue that it’s an artistic reappropriation of existing materials in keeping with the concept of remix culture. I just call it an easy way out, and try to be a bit careful about who I’m ripping off. (Furniture catalogs? Cool. Artists’ work on DeviantArt? Not cool.)

This way, I could also include things in backgrounds we did not have, such as a big back yard with a huge tree or a fast food joint adjacent to our house.

Game mechanics

I decided to use this game as a sort of premiere of the user interface that’s going to be in Space Quest Historian: The Adventure Game. It’s a context sensitive multi-select interface that was graciously coded specifically for me by a man named Ben Ess, who goes by the name @CalicoReverie on Twitter. I’ll probably do a post later on explaining how this thing works, because it’s really quite amazing.

Suffice it to say, this meant I was able to do unique interactions for hotspots and characters. Instead of just having ubiquitous verbs like “look,” “push,” “talk,” etc., I could have “paw at,” “scratch,” “knock over,” and basically whatever I could think of. Only time with regards to how much content I wanted to put in was a real constraint in this matter.

Clicking on the radiator provides these unique verbs.

I also decided that there shouldn’t be any inventory puzzles in the game. Because, well, where are the cats going to keep objects? Cats can’t even pick up objects. Have you seen them bat around a bottle cap on the floor? Reminds me of that Eddie Izzard bit:

As human beings, we think ourselves pretty damn groovy. We do, because we have two things – we have communication… and we have thumbs. These are two things – communication, so we can say things like, “Well, I suppose so,” and thumbs so we can pick things up. Otherwise we just go (mimes pushing something around), like cats do. You know how cats do that with a little ball of something or other…? ‘Cause if cats had thumbs, they’d go… (mimes picking up ball and putting it down repeatedly) It’s not so much fun, is it?

But I did want the two cats to work together. So I decided that you should be able to switch between the two cats, effectively making this a multiple protagonist game. That may have had something to do with recently playing Thimbleweed Park and griping about how its multiple protagonist angle didn’t quite work; I’m not sure. I’m also not sure if I did it any better, but at least the two protagonists in my game have a shared common interest in solving the puzzles!

I did a quick GUI that let you switch between the two cats. This introduced an interesting bug in the game, though, which haunted me for quite some time. Whenever I told the game to switch protagonists, it wouldn’t put the other character in the correct room. Eventually I figured out it was a bug in the “smooth scrolling” plugin that Ben had helpfully installed into the multiverb template he’d made for me.

Maybe I should have these made as pins.

It also meant that, if I had a scrolling screen, the camera would only follow the first protagonist. If the player switched to the second protagonist and tried to get him to walk across a scrolling screen, the camera would stay put while the protagonist gleefully walked off the edge of the screen, never to be seen again.

I managed to track down the bit of code that forced the camera to center on the protagonist and, rather than trying to fix it or somehow extricate the scrolling screen plugin from the template, I opted to bite the bullet and just not have scrolling screens in the game at all. This at least allowed me to switch characters without the game acting up.k

Music and sound effects

The game needed some authentic meows. And I figured no one could accurately portray my kitties other than the kitties themselves.

So, one morning, when the kitties were feeling particularly frisky, I chased them around with my smartphone, mewling at them like an idiot, trying to get them to vocalize. Surprisingly, it worked.

I also recorded the sound of our bedroom door opening and closing (didn’t have to talk to it, though). For the rest of the sound effects, though, I relied on FreeSound.org, an online repository of sound effects and field recordings that, I think, most developers know about and happily use. It’s quite a feeling to be able to search for “cat vomit” and actually get three or four choices of upchucking sounds.

When it came time to do the music, it was Thursday evening — with the deadline for the jam looming the very next day. I basically scrambled. I loaded up my music sequencer, loaded up a drum machine, a fake acoustic guitar VST, and a couple of string-sounding synthesizers, and just basically did all 9 tracks of the soundtrack from that template. Which is why you’ll maybe notice that the tracks all have the same sounds, just in various configurations. That took maybe a couple of hours.

The final touches – and we’re done!

Blurry-eyed and honestly a little sick of cats, I watched my computer’s system clock turn to midnight, then to 1 o’clock in the morning as I wrote the last incidental interactions. That’s why there aren’t a lot in the game, despite having a UI that allows for a multitude of interesting responses.

The last thing to go into the game was the credits. At this point, I just decided to throw up a couple of text boxes instead of doing anything fancy. “That’ll have to do,” I reasoned, as I compiled the game and sat down to do one last play-through.

I hooked the laptop up to the tv and pet my cat with my left hand as I guided his virtual avatar through his adventures outdoors for the last time.

Is the game done? A game is never done. There are probably a bunch of bugs in there that I didn’t catch myself. I didn’t have time to have anyone playtest it before release, so I’m sure you’ll come across one or two things that I didn’t think of. If you find any, please don’t hestitate to drop me a line (or just tweet me).

Gimme a fighting chance — rate the game

When you go to the game’s page, you’ll see this thing in the right column of the screen:

This isn’t mine. I had to screencap someone else’s.

Please click one of the fancy lightning bolts and give my game a rating. (A high rating would be nice, of course.) The more ratings the game has, the better chance it stands of one of the AdventureJam judges actually giving it a second glance.

I hope you enjoy Kitty Quest! It was fun to make, and I hope you have fun playing it!

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/20/making-kitty-quest-my-submission-for-adventurejam-2017/feed/1Kitty Quest title screenpleimertHow to quickly make a 1st person FMV game in Adventure Game Studiohttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/04/how-to-quickly-make-a-1st-person-fmv-game-in-adventure-game-studio/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/04/how-to-quickly-make-a-1st-person-fmv-game-in-adventure-game-studio/#respondThu, 04 May 2017 09:00:51 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=1934AdventureJam 2017 starts tomorrow. As promised, here is my second Adventure Game Studio tutorial.

Today, we’re going to learn how to make FMV games — yes, Full Motion Video games. The kind that were really popular in the mid-90s and, some would say, reduced adventure games to interactive PowerPoint presentation with laughable acting.

Only few companies got FMV right (the best of which were the Tex Murphy games like Under A Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer), and most of them were just overblown and ridiculous (like Take 2’s Ripper).

The acting in Ripper was “un-fuckin’-believable.”

Will you fare any better? Here’s hoping, because I’m about to teach you how.

]]>https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/04/how-to-quickly-make-a-1st-person-fmv-game-in-adventure-game-studio/feed/0agstutorial2-thumbpleimertHow to quickly make a Sierra/LucasArts-style game in Adventure Game Studiohttps://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/02/how-to-quickly-make-a-sierralucasarts-style-game-in-adventure-game-studio/
https://spacequesthistorian.com/2017/05/02/how-to-quickly-make-a-sierralucasarts-style-game-in-adventure-game-studio/#respondTue, 02 May 2017 09:57:57 +0000http://spacequesthistorian.com/?p=1914AdventureJam 2017 is upon us next week! This means that adventure game developers from all around the world — the good, the bad, the smelly, and the first-time curious — will have two weeks to create an adventure game from scratch.

The beauty of the AdventureJam is that no one expects perfection. It’s just what you can knock out in two weeks. There is a ton of fun to be had with that kind of time constraint. It often forces you to go to silly places, to experiment, and to just do something for the hell of it.

I know a lot of people who say they want to make adventure games, but have no idea how. Back in August of last year, I made a series of tutorial videos that took you through the basics. They were a bit rambly and long-winded, though.

So, in anticipation of this year’s AdventureJam, I have made two new tutorial videos that are a lot more snappy — aimed at getting you started quickly.

The first one is about how to make a Sierra/LucasArts style adventure game with on-screen characters:

Neither of these games did very well at all. They won no awards. I don’t think the judges even played them, to be honest, and if they did, they probably turned them off in disgust very early on.

I did, however, also contribute slightly to two jam titles that did far better. In 2015, I wrote some dialogue for Late Last Nite, a game that ended up getting the “Judge’s Pick” from then-judge Steven Alexander of Infamous Quests.

All of these games were made in the “wouldn’t it be cool?” kind of spirit. We weren’t looking to blow up or become darlings of the indie scene. We just did it because it was fun.

What Spunky Found may look like a piece of shit, and it certainly is, but it got me back into making games. I hadn’t touched Adventure Game Studio in a long-ass while, but it gave me the excuse to get back into it.

Not only did it rekindle my love for making games. It reminded me just how easy it actually is to make a game when you stop caring about how shitty it looks. And that’s how you get better.

You don’t make perfection the first time around. You make something that looks like utter shit, and then you move on to the next project — which will, by the virtue of personal growth, look a little less shit. And so on, and so on.

Your games may start out looking like shit, but that’s all right. They WILL get better.

Doing game jams also allows you to put the cap in a very short project without procrastinating. At the end of the two weeks, you have a finished product. It may not be finished in the sense that you’re happy with it, but it’s finished. You’re free to let it go and move on. It’s a very rewarding feeling.

I always look forward to this time of year. Even though I’m currently spending most of my free time developing Space Quest Historian: The Adventure Game, as well as maintaining my YouTube channel and podcasts, I relish the thought of kicking back for two weeks and just doing whatever. Just something silly and for the hell of it.

I hope you’ll join us in making something silly and for the hell of it. Or something deeply profound and serious. That’s all up to you. But I hope you’ll join us, and hopefully this video will help you get started on that.